My mailbox is full with "news" sites reporting that in an exclusive interview with CBR.com, Chris Pratt has broken his silence on whether or not he'll play Booster Gold!

"As far as DC characters pan, I don't know. I will let the fans tell me what they would want me to do. I don't have anything official to announce. I haven't spoken to James Gunn in any capacity to where he's offered me anything like that."

So there you have it. If you want Chris Pratt to play Booster Gold, tell him. If you don't, tell him. Apparently, he's listening.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: chris pratt crb.com james gunn television

Flash's so-called "one minute war" has been rolling along for months, and in last week's The Flash #795, we finally got another appearance by the Gold Beetle (last seen in January's The Flash: One Minute War Special).

"The One-Minute War, Part Six: Give Me Liberty"; written by Jeremy Adams; art by Roger Cruz, George Kambadais, Fernando Pasarin, and many more

Gold Beetle is in only a few panels in this issue, most of which are pretty spoiler-y. What I *can* say is that despite multiple Multiversal reboots, it seems that DC just can't let Heroes in Crisis go.

We'll have to pay attention to future issues for more information.

Thanks to Rob Snow for keeping tabs on Gold Beetle for us.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: flash george kambadais gold beetle jeremy adams one minute war rob snow

A little something different today for Booster Gold #21. Rather than show you the page that's my favorite — probably page 6, but I like Ty Templeton inking Dan Jurgens so much, it could be just about any of them — I'm going to showcase the page I think is the most interesting. Page 21:

As I said, I love the art, the beautifully naturalistic posing, musculature, textures, and expressions. But what makes this page so interesting to me is the layout.

Since Booster Gold is the first to speak in panel one, he's on the left. As a rule in English-language comics, speech balloons should be read in order from left to right (following the visual scanning tendency imparted by our left-to-right language construction). Therefore, it generally follows that in American comics, the first speaker should appear on the left side of the panel. In this case, that's Booster, who Jurgens the artist cleverly puts in the long cast shadow of the evil alien mastermind. So far, so great.

The alternating tight close-ups in panels two and three follow in the familiar tradition of the cinematic Western showdown between gunslingers, with Booster playing the white hat cowboy against the gloating villain. The allusion to a gunfight is especially apt given Booster's charged wrist blaster and accompanying death threat. That's a bluff, of course, but the alien hopefully doesn't know that.

And then there's panel four. By the same rules as panel one, the first speaker, Booster, should be on the left. But there's extra reason to put Booster on the left here because Booster was established on the left in panel one. Sequential art and cinema follow many of the same rules, one of those being the convention that speakers shouldn't abruptly swap positions during a scene. Cinema calls this the 180-degree rule. While this rule can and sometimes should be broken, doing so always calls attention to the violation, which is unwarranted here. So it might seem that panel four is following all the rules. But it's also wrong.

From the position of the reader, when the alien Rangor tells Booster Gold to "look," he points behind Booster to the left. In sequential art, where each panel represents a specific moment in a sequence, Rangor is essentially pointing the reader backwards in time. The figures in the panel should be posed such that Rangor points to the right, visually guiding the reader's eye to the issue's big reveal on the story's last page.

In the original publication, this is especially egregious as page 21 was printed on the left side of a two page spread!

When the issue was reprinted in Booster Gold: Future Lost, DC had the good sense to revise this so that page 21 was printed on the righthand side. The reader has to turn the page to uncover the surprise ending. It's a big improvement.

While we're here, I'd be amiss not to call attention to the contribution to these panels by colorist Gene D'Angelo. The first panel is a primarily an unsettling orange. Then each panel becomes progressively cooler in color temperature — pink, light blue, dark blue — as Booster's hot-blooded threat is chilled by the villain's machinations. It's a very nice touch (that looks even better with Jurgens' pyramidal layout).

Did I say this wasn't my favorite page? I might have to rethink that.

Booster Gold comics: even when they're bad, they're good!

Comments (2) | Add a Comment | Tags: dan jurgens favorite pages gene d'angelo sequential art ty templeton